A crisis of democratic accountability: public libel law and the checking function of the press
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis undertakes a comparative analysis of public libel law in the United States, Australia, Britain, New Zealand, and Canada. It is comprised of nine chapters structured around four interrelated themes. Part A introduces the problem of public libel law. After outlining its main sources and principles in our five comparators, Chapter One concludes by highlighting a more troubling concern than presently acknowledged in constitutional law scholarship. That is, the recent liberalisation of public libel doctrine appears to have happened without any 'selection theory' to justify its doctrinal variability. Chapter Two then surveys two methodological barriers to principled public libel regulation before reviewing Alexander Meiklejohn's 'self-governance' rationale and Vincent Blasi's 'checking value' of the press, the two democratic models anchoring our present enquiry. Part B provides a comprehensive comparative law analysis of public libel doctrine. Chapters Three, Four, and Five reveal that its foremost deficiency is a pervasive disregard of accountability concerns and the checking function of the press. Part C responds with a new approach for addressing the theoretical and comparative law errors revealed in Parts A and B, and for reintroducing the checking function into public libel jurisprudence. Chapter Six identifies the root of public libel law's undertheorising in the complex relationships between democracy, representation, and accountability. Chapter Seven then proposes an innovative analytical framework for improving the design and customisation of public libel doctrine based on recent advances in public accountability theory. Part D tests our revised analytical framework by applying it to the United Kingdom and its newly-updated public libel doctrine. After reviewing Britain's accountability profile in Chapter Eight, Chapter Nine then provides our project's law reform recommendations. I conclude by emphasising the relevance of the present-day 'crisis of journalism' and the broader significance of contextual challenges to prospective public libel law reforms.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.014 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.034 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".